V.K. Krishna Menon, India's legendary Prime Minister Nehru's acerbic, brilliant, Sovietized alter ego, said you could say anything about India and it would be true.
Its more than one billion people, its 1.3 million square miles, represent everything: physiological human form, blacker than Africans and whiter than Scandinavians, religious belief from Buddhist rationality to idol worship, incredibly rich individuals to the world's most bereft, sophisticated intellectuals to tribals not that long from headhunting, the world's wettest point to deserts, the highest mountains to the longest sea level plain, etc., etc.
That may be why some recent analysts of India-U.S. relations are a little like the apocryphal troop of blind savants examining the elephant. They come away describing entirely different beasts with one grabbing the trunk and the other the huge and pleated behind.
It’s fashionable to talk of the growing possibilities of an alliance between “the world’s oldest and the world’s largest democracy”. In the recent decision to sell F16s to Pakistan – a reward for Gen. Musharraf’s cooperation in the war against terrorism – Washington was quick to speak of broadening military collaboration with New Delhi offering the same planes and the possibility of opening the gates of dual use technology.
In the Asian bilateral patchwork of collaboration Washington inevitably constantly shuffles in its attempt to defend the homeland with forward defense, no doubt India has a role. The danger, however, is to overestimate possibilities in the face of grim realities:
1] Washington’s mantra India and Pakistan’s bilateral relationship with the U.S. need not be a zero sum game flies in the face of reality. The unity British domination built on traditional ties was fundamental. The carving out of Pakistan [and later Bangla Desh] did not cut the geographical and historical ties binding the region. Were there no other, India’s Moslems number more than Pakistan’s 145 million. There is the obvious collaboration of local Moslem radicals in Kashmir and elsewhere with foreign-based terrorists.
If for no other reason, were Pakistan to lapse into Islamicist radicalism or chaos, India would be the first victim. Therefore, success in the U.S. policy of cultivating Islamabad-Washington amity and Pakistan stability is as important to Indian security as it is to Washington’s effort to root out worldwide terrorism. But convincing New Delhi is a steep uphill job.
2] India’s Cold war alliance with the Soviet Union has left its mark. Even the supposedly pro-American Baharat Janata Party-led coalition which last year gave way to a Congress Party-dominated coalition [replete with its reliance on India’s Communists] continued New Delhi’s dependence on Russian arms. Commitment to an expensive refurbishing of an outdated Russian aircraft carrier in the face of all logic was a reflection of the continuing infatuation of the Indian establishment with Moscow. [Krishna Menon’s promise to Nehru Moscow could restrain Beijing in the Himalayas in the face of Indian forward-positioning did little to end this strange love affair.]
In New Delhi’s three wars with Pakistan, Indian forces have displayed all the valor for which the British Indian army was famous through World War II. But corruption and political decision-making put into question its effectiveness [a peacetime average of a MIG crash every month for almost four years!]
3] The Indian economy appears leaving behind the long decades of Soviet-style planning with its “Hindu rate of growth”. But it is a long way from assuming “the golden ghettos” of Bangalore and Hyderabad which have made India a player in the globalized IT represents the break-through for the Indian economy, the boom in U.S-India trade notwithstanding. Ask any foreign investor about the differences in dealing with China’s Communist bureaucracy and getting an investment going in India!
Many would like to believe the India-China competition is the tortoise and the hare, that ultimately Indian individuality and representative government will offer more longterm stability. But it is a speculation, pure and simple.
4] The simple-minded concept India will be the U.S. catspaw in what is shaping up as an American effort to insure China’s new power is applied peacefully in the region and the world is fraught. Indian diplomats will play the angles for their own security. That is as it should be. The question is whether more realism will be asserted than in the past when Nehru became China’s handmaiden in its penetration of the non-Communist world just 50 years ago at the Bandoeng Conference.
There was perhaps no more irony than Prime Minister Wen Jiabao’s urging the two countries take the “strategic high ground” in their relationship on the eve of his current visit. Beijing did just that when after 1950 it consolidated its hold on Tibet, continuing until today to build an elaborate network of Himalayan roads and military deployment unmatched by India on its side of the border. And with Maoists threatening to take over Nepal lodged between the two giants, with their extensive connections to armed insurgents in eight Indian states, that higher ground could be decisive.
Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@comcast.net),
is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent
for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International.
He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.
